Meanwhile
by chocolate chip homicide
Summary: But Katniss is a million miles away being stripped and polished for the slaughter, and they are here with nothing they can do to reach her / / Gale, Madge, and what they do when the girl they love is gone. Gale x Madge.
_AN: I don't know I just have a lot of Gadge feelings right now okay_

 _Disclaimer: Honestly I'm not worth the effort to sue. You'll manage to squeeze like three dollars and some pocket lint out of me. Maybe some chewing gum if you bring your A-game._

* * *

Until then, Madge's entire life is soft. Soft white days run through her fingertips like sand, blurring the edges into one slipping stream of consciousness. She lives alone in a house so huge that it always feels empty, whitewashed walls and air heavy with silence; her mother, bedridden upstairs wracked with pain in a room that smells of lavender and death; her father, confined to his study and the running of the forgotten District and Madge, held in self-contained exile in her bedroom, filling the empty walls with paintings, or softening the harsh, lonely edges of noiselessness with her piano. Until then.

And then Effie Trinket's voice rings out across the courtyard in a shrill shriek, and Madge's world descends into sound as Primrose Everdeen, tiny, fragile little Primrose with her trembling hands and straight face walks up to the podium. And Madge has spent her entire life waiting in the fringes and watching the nothing that is her life drift by. Has spent her entire life _doing_ nothing.

She stops. She starts. Something tugs at her chest and her breath hitches and she pushes forward, the words forming as a blooming whisper.

Katniss gets there first.

Madge hangs back and watches Katniss, fierce, fiery Katniss shove her sister behind her and mount the stage. The words hang on her lips, budding in her throat, stopped. A lifetime of doing nothing, and it's all she can do.

* * *

She gives her the pin, at least. She is frantic to grasp onto the little last action that she can take, and this pure gold pin, the mockingjay of the rebellion, the legacy of her aunt, is a single stitch on a gaping gash. But it's all she can do now. Her arms hang limply by her sides as she watches the train fly away into a speck on the horizon, carrying Katniss and the pin into infinity, away. For all her money, for all her father's power, she drowns in her own passivity, the flutter of her white dress the only movement as she stands on the edge of the platform.

The silence deafens her.

* * *

The fence seems a hundred miles high, ringed in barbed wire, and Madge swears she can hear the buzzing. She's spent her entire life staying five feet away from that fence, while Katniss dives under it and into the green tangle of trees, where every animal means danger for the merchant girl and life for the Seam.

But Katniss is a million miles away, being stripped down and polished so they can show her off before they slaughter her. And Gale was not in class today.

She picks her way through the forest, soft white hands reaching out to touch every knotted trunk, every patch of untrodden grass, every flower not withered into itself with the black dust that coats the Seam, turns the fresh white scent of life into the tang of something thick and black and stagnant. The flowers smell of life. Not Twelve. In Twelve, everything smells of coal dust.

Not Madge, though. She washes herself in lavender soap and rosemary liquid from the apothecary almost daily. Her hands are soft with butter and thyme, all the tangles eased from her hair until it shines like spun gold.

Gale doesn't smell of coal dust either. He smells of bark, toughened with age and peeled back to reveal a fresh green; he smells of the smoke that pours into the open air and isn't clogged with coal. He smells of fresh apples, and river-reeds, and damp leather. He smells of earth, and a clear and endless sky.

Madge finds him where the woods clear into fresh grass. Her hands are still clenched around her mother's bone-handled kitchen knife, held to her chest like a talisman. For the first time in her life, she is out of her element.

Her looks up at her through furrowed brows, fingers digging into the grass. His gaze prickles against her skin. The muscles on his neck tighten, say _you are not wanted here._

She breathes in, and sits down next to him, close enough that the whisper of the wind blows the skirt of her dress to brush against his calf.

"Why are you here?" he says, finally.

Madge stares out over the hills, the grass swaying gently in the restless hum of the air.

Katniss was my friend too. You're the only one who-

She breaks off. He looks at her again, his gaze flaming her cheeks. Her skin is too smooth for this, so pale and thin the web of her veins is visible against the curve of her nape, and she can see the rough on his knuckles and the callouses on his wrist where his shirt is rolled up, marks left like scratches on a bark beaten with age.

I gave her the pin. The gold one- the mockingjay, I mean. You know the mockingjays- they used them in the rebellion. I though, maybe-

He turns away from her, but she doesn't fail to notice the way the tendons at his shoulders unclench, his palms uncurling from their fists.

It takes an hour for her to work up the courage to speak again. Every hour, as the sun melts into the blue of the sky, staining it amber, streaking the melted white slips of cloud gold, she shifts closer to him, until somehow her hand is on his.

She walks home in the darkness, knife hanging from her fingers, back into the stifling safety of her bed. For the first time, with that endless sky in the fringes of her memory, her house feels far too small.

* * *

She learns that he does not watch the first part of the Games- not the glittering spectacle where some of Twelve's children, at home or in the slaughterhouse, still have hope. She wouldn't know. She watches curled up on the couch, Father close enough that he can pretend to be watching if the Peacekeepers check, her fingers working a needle over a white scrap of silk, filling it with colour.

* * *

She watches him at school, shoulders hunched up, guard and defences raised. She watches gazes and whispers flutter after him, cling to his clothes: the giggling burbles of the girls, the jealousy, the rolling admiration from the Seam, the muttering that follows him, the dangerous, the respected rule-breaker.

Now without Katniss. Madge does the math in her head. Subtract Katniss. Add a flurry of whispers, of pity false and true, of the looks she knows he can feel and the prelude to the bloody spectacle playing on every screen in Twelve equals a simmering storm of a boy, eyes brimming with dark thunderclouds, knuckles cracking like lightning.

He still brings her strawberries, washed and wrapped in paper. She watches him through the clear confines of her window, and slips out to follow him with a note left telling her parents that she's having dinner at a friend's house.

"You really shouldn't be here," he says, as the green surrounds and frees them. He paces through the forest like a wildcat going in circles, hands balled into fists, always in action, always running over with restless motion, the frustration balled up inside his chest, pushing forward so that Madge has to run every other step to keep up with him.

He skips class more often than not, to be out here (Madge assumes). To come out where it's open and quiet and the only whispers are the rustling of the trees. Where he feels at home, where Madge feels like an intruder. She's still not sure why she comes. He could kill her here, a knife across her throat and then nothing. But he won't. Not with Katniss tugging at the fringe of their minds, Katniss the invisible thread that connects them, Katniss who both of them love.

She follows him out into the open space where he hides and falls asleep in the hum of twilight, the soft shroud that tugs her eyelids down and wraps her in darkness, the lull of crickets and the impossibility of the endless, boundless sky. She falls asleep on his lap, her hair fluttering inches from his knife, the silent understanding between them both. He wakes her up near midnight when he shifts to stand, and she doesn't miss the way he pauses to wait for her to rise.

* * *

Gale doesn't watch the Games, but Madge does not have that luxury. She watches, rapt, open-mouthed, as a beaming Katniss lights herself on fire and burns in a shower of sparks on the chariot. Later, at the interviews, Peeta does the same to the Capitol, set the frothing mass alight with a few careful words. Katniss's face is up on the big screen, and Madge knows Gale will be watching.

* * *

He comes to her that evening, an arm full of rabbit pelts to sell, knocking at her door in twilight.

Come inside, I'll get the money, she says. He stands awkwardly in the hallway, his dark, dirt-scuffed figure looking so out of place in the clear, whitewashed walls of her house.

"Is your father home?" he asks. Madge looks up at him, and shakes her head no. State meeting. Games stuff.

"Your mother? Anyone-"

And then she sees. She sees the boy simmering and bubbling over, knuckles and teeth tight. She sees the boy with the girl he doesn't know he loves yet gone and in the gloved hands of the Capitol. She sees the boy who kisses girl after girl behind the bridge or on the slag heap to numb what he knows, that Katniss doesn't want him yet, not like that.

She sees the man who's become his own father, and one to three children, who's shouldered pain and heartbreak and starvation since fourteen, who's pushing up against the weight of his siblings and hunger and his own District, and now Katniss in the Capitol, Katniss in the Games and replaced with whispers and a weight of expectation, and just wants to fucking _forget_ for an hour or so.

And maybe Madge feels like forgetting too.

She drops the money, and it drips to the floor like rain. He puts the pelts down on her nice white sofa. And they collide, a tangle of limbs and hot, heavy breath like the gasps of a drowning man coming up for air, his hands around her throat and her fingers tearing at his shirt. And Katniss is still there, there now that she's gone, tugging at their minds, always, always there as they collapse, spent, onto her mattress.

The next morning he brings her strawberries, just like nothing's changed.

* * *

 _AN: Reviews make me feel warm and fuzzy inside_


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